DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. help please!!

[Smaff]

hi, recently my laptop has been subject to this blue screen quite frequently. ( usually up to 5-6 times a day): DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL.
I was wondering:
1. Will this damage my laptop and/or eventually break my laptop??
2. How do i fix this blue screen error?

This blue screen has been occurring for nearly a month now and nothing has happened, (only the frustration of having to start up my computer again)

Thanks,
Smaff

 

[patonb]

You need to test your RAM. Also dis you recently install or update drivers?

The error code asociated with the message is whats needed, but you can d/l windbg from MS, and it'll read the dump files and let you know whats crashing.

To test you ram, d/l memtest, burn it to a disk, and boot to it. It'll scan your RAM and let you know if its bad or not. Let it ryn a couple hours

Try memtest 1st, then check the BSOD logs.

 

[JeffO]

Any time a booted computer spontaneously reboots or blue-screens, that is bad for your hard-drive data. It tends to cause corruption and stranded temp files, which hog little bits of space.

The problem is caused by a driver. it's not necessarily that the driver is written wrong, it may be that you've got file corruption that's getting worse over time, and now a particular driver is unable to load into memory in a useful way.

It would help for you to know which driver, like patonb said, but if the problem is being caused by corruption, then you might have thousands of corrupted files, getting worse every day.

You should check your memory first, again like patonb said.
Then run CHKDSK /R. If that won't run, try CHKDSK /F first, then try CHKDSK /R again. You should check your physical memory first because if you memory is bad, then running CHKDSK through bad memory could lead to even more corruption, instead of fixing corruption.
It is possible that corruption has occurred that CHKDSK can't fix. In that case, you should uninstall and reinstall and/or update every driver you can, starting with motherboard drivers.
Laborious, I know, but probably the only way.

Hopefully the corruption isn't being caused by a failing hard drive. A failing hard drive tends to log lots of System errors: Event 7. If these are pointing at a DVD, CD, or USB, don't worry. If they point at a hard drive partition, then that says you have corruption, and may or may not be fixed with CHKDSK. So if you have Event 7 errors, and you run CHKDSK, clear the logs. Then monitor the logs to see if Event 7's come back. That would indicate that maybe you need to replace your hard drive before it dies.

Also, MemTest is a great utility. However, once i ran extensive memory tests that all came up good, but i just couldn't figure out what the problem was. since i had extra memory, I swapped it anyways. That fixed it. Some problems are intermittent, and a memory tester might still be unable to detect a problem.
If you don't have extra memory, another thing to try is to swap your memory sticks. If you have two sticks, reverse which slots they're in. If it takes longer to end up with the same problem, then you could suspect one of the sticks.

Hope this gives you a practical list of things to try.